REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success

David Wachs's latest venture, Handwrytten, provides scalable, robotic solutions that write your notes in pen. Used by businesses in all industries, Handwrytten changes the way brands and people connect.

Prior to Handwrytten, David founded Cellit, a leading mobile marketing platform. With clients including Abercrombie and Fitch, Walmart and more, Cellit was sold in January of 2012.

David is a speaker on marketing technology, has been featured in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, and is a contributor to Inc. Magazine.

Most passionate about

• My new company, Handwrytten. It's not so new at this point; we've been around for seven years. Our goal is to reignite the lost art of Handwrytten communications.
• Specifically, we focus on communication from business to business or business to consumer in this day and age of electronic communication—whether that's email or text or Slack, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all these other forms of electronic communication or old-fashioned junk mail, preprinted stuff that gets thrown directly in the trash bin.
• About seven years ago, we started this company with the idea of making and sending Handwrytten.
• We have a website, an iPhone app, and Android app plugins for major systems called Zapier and API, stuff like that, that allow people to get their notes to us very quickly in electronic form.
• On the other side of the technology, we have robots that we build in our facility in Arizona. They hold real pens and write these notes out at scale. The robots can write out about 750 notes a day each.

David’s career and story

• I grew up very middle class in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Always, even from the youngest days, I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
• When I went off to university, I specifically took a double major in business and engineering. I chose computer science engineering.
• I was in this program at the University of Pennsylvania called the Management Technology Program. I got a degree in engineering and a degree in business from Wharton. Then I went on and worked in consulting.
• In 2000, which was at the height of the dot-com bubble, I went to work for a consulting firm that was helping large companies start dot-coms inside of them. It was just standard management consulting, but it was a good experience nonetheless, and they worked me to the bone.
• I then wanted to get into venture capital. I worked in equity analysis for a large investment bank, Credit Suisse, first in Boston, and then I was moved over to a venture capital firm in San Diego, where I was abruptly fired without cause.
• When I moved out to San Diego to work at this venture capital firm, I had no savings left. I was relatively debt-free, but I had no savings. So, when I got fired, I moved home. My family had relocated. My parents had moved to Arizona, so I moved home to Arizona with my head between my legs. I didn't know what to do next.
• I started a text messaging company called Cellit. This was in 2004. Back then, we didn't have the iPhone or anything like that. When you drive by a house that was for sale, you'd want to collect information on that house, get the price, and all that, but oftentimes there was no way to get information about that house. So I started this company called Cellit. Our first product was called House for Sell.
• I quickly pivoted away from Realtors to more large brands. Within a few years, we were sending millions of text messages for brands like Abercrombie & Fitch, which is a large clothing brand, toys, Walmart—some very, very large brands. I ended up selling that company in 2012.
• I started Handwrytten because what I realized, when I sold that company, was that I wanted to send Handwrytten notes to all my employees...

Simon Severino helps business owners in SaaS and services discover how to be able to run their company more efficiently which results in sales that soar. He created the Strategy Sprints® Method that doubles revenue in 90 days by getting owners out of the weeds.

Simon is the CEO and founder of Strategy Sprints which is a global team of certified Strategy Sprints® Coaches which has offers a customized strategy to help clients gain market share and work in weekly sprints which results in fast execution.

He is also a Forbes Business Council Member, a contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine, and a member of Duke Corporate Education.

Most passionate about

• We are helping entrepreneurs navigate these funky times. The two things that they need most are time and cash. We help them improve the volume of their work to get them down to a healthy level of work per day, versus working too much. And we help them improve sales.
• We are growing like crazy right now. I haired five new coaches to my team and I have onboarded a new head of sales and he will be recruiting salespeople in the next month. We are growing because we have a digital plug-and-play offer to help business owners. Since nobody can fly right now, because of COVID, companies need our help in generating sales.

Simon’s career and story

• I have been doing strategy consultancy for 17 years now.
• I've done market entry strategy in New York, management system optimization in Beijing, and everything in between.
• The first thing that I started doing was having my own little private practice as a coach. Then I went to a big consultancy, where I really learned the craft.
• I was a junior consultant, senior consultant, then a junior project manager, senior project manager, principal, the whole ladder.
• I was a young psychotherapist. It was not very impactful and was not the place where I was meant to be. My second try was as a leadership coach and leadership trainer. That was where I found my place.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• I would say, make a list of everything that you're doing. Cut the list in half. Then take this list, cut it in half again, and execute.
• When you cut what you are currently doing, you will automatically ask yourself “What is the most important thing to do?” and “Now what will pop up as the most important thing?” The first thing will be your family, but then comes your customer. What is really helping your customers succeed? This is the most important question for a business owner: which of my activities are really helping my customer succeed? That should be one block of the things that you do every day.
• The second one is “Which activities are really helping my company grow?” These are joint venture partnerships, working on the forms, the function of your sales and marketing system and the like.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• The biggest failure was in 2013, when I was a strategy advisor of the BMW group.
• We had a project of around one year to become number one in the world and to stay number one in the world. We started creating the Factbook and analyzing who are the competitors. They picked some competitors and we picked some competitors. One of these competitors was Tesla.
• The CEO said, “No, we don't need to take them so seriously. It's just a billionaire from America who has no idea about building cars.”
• At that time, his assumption was “this is not relevant.” Many years later, the I8 and I3 models are now on the streets. The strategy has been born electric in the history of the company.
• The direction was fine, but my failure was not to validate assumptions.
• What I learned from this failure and what I'm doing differently now in the strategy sprints method—you...

Warren helps principled entrepreneurs build a Business That Matters. That is one that delivers to you, the owner, attractive profits and a fulfilling lifestyle while also creating positive impacts on customers, team and the larger community. In other words, it is one that helps make the world - or just your corner of it - a better place.

He’s been helping entrepreneurs do this since 2002. He was the top Coach in Canada with the world’s largest business coaching company before going out to focus on Businesses That Matter.

His clients have experienced everything from 8 figure exits, to 7 figure salaries, from rapid expansion to minimized operational work because of the development of great leaders and high-performance values-driven cultures.

Warren’s also a recovering lawyer, a serial entrepreneur, college professor, actor, theater director and Dad to a wonderful daughter who constantly challenges him to be a better person.

Most passionate about

• I'm really getting passionate about helping people lift their heads and say, “Okay, there are some really interesting opportunities.”
• I've been really passionate about ringing the bell, starting to build your strategy, starting to build your plans, not just for the next two months, but for the next 10 months.

Warren’s career and story

• I was supposed to die at birth. I was given a zero percent chance of survival. I was the second person in history to live through this weird congenital defect. When I found out about that, it spurred in me a desire to do something.
• I was a lawyer. I've been an actor and theater director. I was a college professor. I've been an entrepreneur. All of those things were because I was trying to find that place where I could make an impact with this unexpected gift that I wasn't supposed to have.
• I believe passionately that entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful forces for positive social change.
• A family friend was doing business coaching. This was back in 2002. I'd never even heard of it. I started looking into it and just fell in love with it.
• That’s what I've been doing ever since – trying to take the lessons I've learned over my own professional career and helping entrepreneurs use them in their own businesses and start to succeed.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• I always think it's “to serve.”
• My definition of sales is professionally helping people solve problems, which makes it a kind of honorable activity.
• If you have a service focus for your customers, like always wanting to help them, you're going to have long client and customer relationships.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I had a client, a really nice guy. I guess where it went wrong was that he and I had very different thinking styles.
• I didn't understand that distinction in our thinking styles well enough. I let him guide the direction because he was in a bit of a crisis.
• We were doing things reactively instead of by a plan. I was encouraging him to move faster and I didn't realize early enough that he wasn't grasping what we were talking about. He actually wound up feeling more insecure rather than more confident. As a coach, I want people to feel more confident.
• He was selling lots, but by lowering the prices, because he just gave the guy commission on sales, not on margins and the guy was dropping prices. The business was growing, but he was actually losing money.

Biggest success with customers

• A guy came to me and was really unmotivated. He was in tax debt, his team wasn't performing, and he was generating some profits and had a decent niche but no real growth plan.
• He was really stuck. Because of where he was emotionally, we

Amy Rose Herrick, ChFC is America’s Profit Building Specialist. Business owners implement her “Secret Profits™” systems to increase profitability $10k-$100k or more by eliminating their hidden “profit eating black holes”.

Clients have turned to Amy since 1991 accelerating profits, increasing bottom lines, de-mystifying root causes of business losses and MAKING MORE MONEY without requiring adding costly inventory, changing locations, or adding more staff.

Amy Rose has several books for sale on Amazon too. Her most recent release is a #1 Amazon Best Seller entitled ”Pack Faith First, Suitcases Second: A Decade of Miracles After 50” that tells the story of her complete “life-do-over” moving from the midwestern United States to a small Caribbean island with her spouse, four school aged kids, the family dog, a few pallets of possessions with no jobs, family, or friends to go to.

Most passionate about

• I am most passionate about helping small business owners make more money.
• I help business owners increase their profits this year and every year. It doesn't matter where your business operates. The concepts and formulas and things I work with apply regardless of currency.

Amy’s career and story

• One of my life goals is to change the awful statistics that I see. In the U.S., at least 60% of businesses were failing before COVID ever hit.
• I started in the corporate world, where I did inventory control and cost accounting.
• I ended up moving into employee benefits. Then I worked in some mode of the tax aspect. I also dealt with office management.
• Over time, in addition to working in this career, I have bought and sold businesses. I have closed a second-generation family business. It was very painful. I've seen all aspects of it.
• I've taught classes on contract for Inner Eyes SBDC. And then I do classes here in the U.S. for AARP, which is a large organization. I do those in the Virgin Islands.
• I developed many courses for small businesses that are very narrowly focused so that we can work on an area.
• I give small businesses the formulas and the workbooks they need. That's how I ended up building the platform, taking over three decades of hands-on experience.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• I really believe in starting any business with a vision of how you are going to sell the business.
• You should always have a business be sellable from day one so that when you need to let go of it, or you want to let go of it, you have got it.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• There were two things.
• The first thing, in one of the industries I mentioned that I was in, securities practice and insurance, they did not allow you to post any type of testimonial. The mistake I made was not collecting testimonials anyway and just holding them back for when I would want them on another day.
• I didn't start out with testimonials that could have been transferable if I had the foresight to collect them. So, that would be one thing: As you're looking at your journey, even if you don't use the testimonials now, get those testimonials. Put them in a file because you may need them later as you're starting another endeavor, just to show your trustworthiness and value.
• The other failure I would say is that there was a very short period of time when I had an unqualified staff person working for me and it was difficult to replace them because of things that I was juggling. That hurt me because trying to undo the damage and trying to catch back up and then fix things was difficult. 

Biggest success with customers

• I had a client who had Alzheimer's and their...

Hi, my Reachers.

This is the eighth ‘Mountain Episode’. It seems like you really love this amazing series of the Reach Or Miss mountains project; Today, I want to share with you the 8th and newest episode where successful entrepreneurs share their mountains stories.

Listen to these incredible mountain stories I heard from the successful entrepreneurs I recently interviewed on my podcast.

You can then listen to the full interview with each of them and hear about their visions, struggles, and how these entrepreneurs reached their success.

From the entrepreneur that booked a trip to Machu Picchu without knowing it’s a mountain. And found himself lying on the floor, gasping for breath…”

To the entrepreneur who had never been mountaineering but found himself climbing one of the highest mountains in Mexico…

To the entrepreneur who said: “I love mountains, but I love taking people up mountains with me… As a founder, as a leader, there are always other people who will come and support you.”

And the entrepreneur who said that what people miss—about mountain climbing specifically, and also in life—that you have to know when to go down. You're not always moving up. You have to be able to get to a certain level, to find a base…”

I hope these mountain stories will encourage you to find out what should you – as an entrepreneur looking for your breakthrough to success – take from their stories to help you find the necessary steps to reach your peak.

Many entrepreneurs climb mountains, while others use mountains as a metaphor to describe what is necessary to conquer the peak – including the fatiguing yet rewarding journey to the top. Still other entrepreneurs use mountains as an analogy for a significant goal they wish to achieve – such as becoming a billion-dollar-market-cap company.

For many years, I’ve compared entrepreneurship to climbing the highest mountains.

You climb step by step to the peak, reach your position as a market leader and a leading brand, and then start climbing a new mountain with a new product line or another brand.

The idea of mountains as representations of a strong position in the market is mentioned by Al Ries and Jack Trout in the excellent book, Marketing Warfare.

“In military warfare, mountains and higher altitude areas represent strong positions and often are used to present a strong defense. In marketing warfare, the question is one of who holds the mountains in the consumer's mind.”

So, at some point after the launch of my podcast for entrepreneurs, I started to ask the successful entrepreneurs I interviewed about their habits or dreams of climbing one of the highest mountains in the world.

Listen to these new inspiring mountains’ stories, find which entrepreneurs and stories you identify with most, and review your entrepreneurial objectives, market overview, and plan. By making your business as strong as possible, you will be able to quickly and easily achieve entrepreneurial success.

Matt Barnett – Papa Bear@Bonjoro “As a founder, as a leader, there are always other people who will come and support you and make the journey to the top much more enjoyable.

It’s about a journey, it's not about the destination, and without people, it's a lonely walk.”

A British designer by trade, Bonjoro is Matts second company, founded out of Sydney Australia. What started as a sales hack for an Agency he was running, Bonjoro went from hack to side hustle to global business in 18months, and now has team across 5 continents.

Matts love of building great products is only surpassed by that of building great culture, and his goal is to be the next Zappos, to be most loved brand in the world.

Matt’s Mountain

“I...

James Layfield is an entrepreneur and investor creating positive change through innovation in sectors ranging from property to financial technology.

Most recently, James co-founded Clearfind, an easy-to-use, unbiased artificial intelligence platform that is changing the way companies manage and optimize software with data.

James is a general partner in a fintech investment fund Treasury with the cofounders of Acorns, Betterment, and a board member of Paypal, and has angel investments across a host of technology ventures.

James has founded and led multiple successful companies including Rise, the world’s largest fintech innovation platform, with Barclays; Never Ever Limited, an innovation catalyst and consulting agency; and Central Working, a shared workspace hub for business professionals.

James is currently an ambassador for CognitionX the AI event, London and Partners, and the ScaleUp Institute. He also serves as the New York Tech Ambassador for the Mayor of London.

Most passionate about

• The thing that I'm working on right now is something that I've been exploring for the last four years, in a really interesting area of the world: software.
• I'm working on a company called Clearfind. We’re here to help people bring software into their company as effectively as possible and manage and reduce the cost of the software.

James’s career and story

• I think of myself as a serial entrepreneur. I've always been driven by an absolute passion to try and solve problems that I have faced in my life.
• I basically created the idea of co-working in the UK, even before the work came around, which is quite exciting, through financial technology. I've been working in financial technology for the last 10 years with some of the biggest banks in the world.
• The number of available options in the market has increased exponentially and yet the tools with which to navigate it are the same. That's why there is this beautiful, cool area for tool like clarified.
• We're bringing that together with AI so that we can augment people in their jobs to make consistently smarter decisions. We think we've excelled at that.
• The first three years of our journey were spent working out how to do the software and then gathering that data. We only launched it in October of last year.
• We’re a four-year-old company that has been selling since October of last year. The reason is that it's really hard to do the thing that we've managed to do. Once we went to market, we found that this resonates with that audience of companies spending between three and 10 million a year and also with consultants.
• We have a couple of the world's largest consultancy firms working with us and are already getting some great results. On top of that, we have companies from many different sectors, from finance and banking to biotech and high-tech. Among all of these organizations, the commonality is the amount of money they're spending annually on software and the complexity of the ecosystem.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• I think basically to listen. I have to constantly remind myself of that.
• What we're doing is going back through the real insights that we have in our business from our real customers and opening our ears to listen to what they're telling us. You then start to adapt and change your messaging and product in a way that's going to resonate with them.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• Many years ago, one of my first ever ventures was an experiential creative agency. We had just gotten to the final stages of hopefully about to win Microsoft.
• We were meeting the people whom you never want to meet when you're trying to sell someone, which is the procurement team.
• We want us both to come...

Derick Van Ness is a Wealth Strategist who is passionate about helping people reach their full potential. His company, Big Life Financial is focused on removing the mystery and misinformation surrounding money and financial strategy so people can live their BIGGEST LIFE!

Derick believes that each person has something unique and valuable to contribute to the world, but that most people are never able to express that gift due to fear, doubt, or worry related to money. His mission is to eradicate that fear and fundamentally change the way that people think about and utilize money within the next generation.

Most passionate about

• I am most passionate today about getting back out and re-engaging with the world after the pandemic.
• I've really been feeling the excitement of getting close to being able to go out and meet with friends, to go dancing and sailing and do a lot of the things that I like to do in my personal life.
• On the business level, I'm really passionate about a lot of the changes that are happening in the way people are engaging with the world. I love how technology is being used in many ways to bring people together.

Derick’s career and story

• I wanted to own my own business. I wasn't sure what it was going to be, but my father was a business owner and I saw the flexibility that it offered him.
• So, I knew that I needed to learn how to sell. I took a sales job right out of college.
• At first, it was just knocking doors, door to door. I was scared to death of that. Then, after doing that for six months, I took a phone sales job where we would cold-call people and build relationships from nothing. That was as hard as could be.
• My first three years out of school, I probably did 50,000 cold calls.
• At that point, I felt like I had the skill set to start my business because I'd worked with so many business owners and seen financial statements, and I knew how to sell. Then I had to decide what I wanted to do. I chose to become a real estate investor and start flipping houses.
• I really learned a lot just by being fortunate enough to have made a lot of money when I was young.
• Today, we do financial strategy and tax strategy for business owners.
• Our goal is to help people create financial certainty so that they can stop worrying so much about money and focus on doing the work or being the person that they're here to be. The company's called Big Life Financial, and the idea is that we get money out of the way so that you can live the big life you're here to live.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• I think the most important thing that gets overlooked in sales is asking good questions and listening to salespeople practice their sales pitch. They practice overcoming objections, they practice how to present, they practice all these things, but it's not what communication is not about, what you’re saying, it's about what the customer is hearing.
• If you don't know their needs, you can't speak in terms of their needs when you present.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I would say my biggest failure with clients is that sometimes, when my business has grown in big spurts, my follow-through of continuing to stay in touch with clients and continuing to stay engaged and active with them, has not been as good as it could have been.
• Relationships have come naturally to me, so I've relied on that. At times in my business growth, by not having cadences, and not having routines, and not having systems to support me, I've dropped the ball.

Biggest success with customers

• I think the best thing that I've ever done, and I kind of learned this in the real estate business, was when my greed glands turn on.
• My...

Bryan Clayton is CEO and cofounder of GreenPal an online marketplace that connects homeowners with Local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the “Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine and has over 200,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day.

Before starting GreenPal Bryan Clayton founded Peachtree Inc. one of the largest landscaping companies in the state of Tennessee growing it to over $10 million a year in annual revenue before it was acquired by Lusa holdings in 2013.

Bryan’s interest and expertise are related to entrepreneurialism, small business growth, marketing and bootstrapping businesses from zero revenue to profitability and exit.

Most passionate about

• I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called GreenPal, which, in one sentence, is kind of like the Uber of lawn mowing.
• We have over 300,000 people using the app and we’re doing $20 million a year in revenue. So, we're kind of an eight-year overnight success.
• Our business has doubled year over year for the past six years. That's the cadence we want to continue until the numbers just get too big.

Bryan’s career and story

• I started mowing grass as a way to make extra cash, to put myself through college. When I graduated college, I had to make a decision. Was I going to stick with this little lawn mowing business, or go into the job market? Luckily, I decided to stay with the lawn mowing business. I didn't really want to be a grass-cutting guy my whole life, but I was making good money. I was earning a good living and I kind of liked it.
• In 2013, that business was acquired by one of the largest landscaping companies in the United States. By growing that business, with just me and a push mower to 150 people, I learned a lot through trial and error about how to grow a business, how to get a business to profitability, and how to get a business sold.
• I realized that about myself and I thought, ‘Okay, well, it's time to start the next thing.’
• The idea for GreenPal was a straightforward one for me. I addressed the things I saw over the previous 15 years of growing a landscaping business. I thought, ‘Okay, an app needs to exist to make this easier, kind of like Airbnb and Uber and Lyft.’
• I recruited two co-founders and we went to work. We really didn't know the first thing about any of that stuff. We just didn't give up. We stuck with it. We focused on little goals and got those done, then kept making the app better and better.
• One thing that got us through those early hard years was that we would make it extremely easy for anybody to talk to us. We would always talk to our users and our customers to get their feedback, to understand what it was we needed to work on. We stuck at it and kept applying that feedback and improving the app. Here we are, eight years later, and we have a profitable business that's growing.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• If you're just getting started, my best advice is to get as many loyal customers as you can, whether it be six, a dozen, twenty, a hundred.
• Don't focus on big goals and big revenue goals. Just focus on little goals, making those people's lives better.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• We thought that the value proposition was going to be to deliver the cheapest way to get your grass cut. We thought, ‘If we can just be $5 or $10 cheaper than the other way, people will use the app.’ That was a mistake.
• Also, in talking to people on both sides of the transaction for a long time, we kind of ignored the supplier side, the vendor side. That came at a cost because we didn't really understand that if these guys and gals weren't really happy with the product, they weren't going to...

Joe Paranteau is a leading expert on sales, generating more than $1B in just five years, an uncommon accomplishment. He has led nearly 30K sales meetings in his 28-year career with Fortune 500, SMBs, and startup businesses. In his first book, Billion Dollar Sales Secrets, he shares fifteen secrets to help inspire salespeople to rise to meet today’s challenges, ignite their dreams and success.

Most passionate about

• My book is coming out. That has been three years in the making.
• I've also completed my MBA. I went back to school during this time, something that I wanted to do, and I'm so happy that I did.
• I'm most passionate about helping everyone increase their sales IQ and really execute so that they can provide the things they need for their families and their companies.
• Our company motto is to help people and businesses throughout the world achieve their full potential. It says nothing about technology but that's what I love to do: help people.

Joe’s career and story

• I'm the first generation in my family to grow up off the Indian reservation. So, I'm a member of a tribe.
• I was the first one to grow up in suburbia. I have these two worlds that I grew up in. I grew up poor and didn't have a lot.
• To help the family, my brother, sister, and I would paint rocks and go door to door to sell them. So, I guess my career really started when I was eight years old.
• I served in the military as a way to do something to better my life.
• I went to college, graduated, and then I had an opportunity to get into sales. I thought I wanted to go into politics. That was my thinking at the time. Then I met someone who said, “Joe, you have a technical background and a background in communication. Very interesting. Why don't you want to go into sales?”
• She explained to me what I just shared with you earlier: That selling is all about helping people get what they want or need. If you can look yourself in the mirror every day and say to yourself, “Today, I helped somebody,” then you're doing all right.
• The company that I worked for was a technology company that was a Microsoft partner, 28 years ago. So, I started there and worked through a series of startups. Some of them were super successful, some of them were not. Many of them got merged and acquired by other companies, but my path at Microsoft has been interesting.
• I've been here 16 years, and this is the sixth role and fourth startup that I've been in inside the company. I've helped start different businesses inside the company. The basis for my book was a startup in our health industry team that I was able to help grow to a billion dollars in five years.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• A pretty good one is to focus. Be comfortable and openly search for ways to fail. Don't be afraid of failure. I've come to a place in my sales and business career where I don't see obstacles. I don't see a sale that could be unwinnable.
• Be open to shifting and being honest with yourself. The only thing that's going against us is time. If we can change the way we approach things, that's really what has to change. If we learn something new, we can approach the situation differently. Then we're one step closer.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• The biggest failure that I've had in sales is not listening well and not aligning myself with what the customer wanted. When I've looked at it from a selfish ambition standpoint, that's a surefire way to fail.
• I had a customer with a very specific set of criteria. At first, it sounded like I knew exactly what they needed, so I rushed that. I went directly into, “Okay, this will be easy to sell.” I missed the mark completely. The customer felt awkward. They told me, “We like you as a...